Tuesday, 17 June 2014

Currently, Taiwan hovers around 4% unemployment (and people complain that it is not 3%).

That is an amazingly low number from a European perspective or a Canadian perspective, however, we can view it with a difference sense of scale when we place it alongside the labor-force participation rate.

Tuesday, 10 June 2014

The overcrowding rate is an extremely useful statistic, even though the subjective notion of what "overcrowding" really means will differ from one culture to the next (and baseline values will reflect the distribution of urban-vs.-rural population, the availability of cheap rental housing, and numerous other factors unique to each milieu).

I've disaggregated the data (for each country) into two lines: (i) the darker line shows the overcrowding rate for families with children, and (ii) the brightly-colored line shows the overcrowding rate for households without children.
So, at a glance, we can see that the direction of the change is very
different for each of the countries shown (in the last few years), and,
also, we can see that the gap between the two lines is different in each case.